Sowmya Aaryan Menon \ Monsoon 2015

*

Brown Love

When he is asleep
the old house gets so cold
that I have to use the heater to warm the floors.
And when the wood is thawed enough
to open without creaking
I look inside his cupboard and arrange his shirts.
He has a lot of browns.
They are not the fresh mushroom brown
not even the sun-tanned skin brown
but the brown that reminds me of dried flowers.
So I stack them color-wise
yellows and blues at the top,
browns at the bottom, crumpled.
Yellow, he says, reminds him of his childhood.
Blue reminds him of his mother.
In the morning when he looks for his shirt
He tells me with a frown on his face, 
I love brown.
They remind me of you.

*

Winter

On a heavy winter morning
of brown skins and grey sky,
our voices thickened with love,
we leant our naked backs on cold rocks
and whispered childish secrets to each other.
In you, the hard tree,
in me the gentle soil.
A Straight back and a slow curve.
Our desire, a drifting wind.
It is like flying you said,
the cold makes us weightless,
the sea drowns our boundaries;
and there, under the transparent sun
we let go of our childhood.

*

Man-Woman

She
who smells of warm rain
and blue flowers that spring
unnoticed in corners and behind curtains

He
who has a dense coffee moustache
Long thick fingers and drinks strong whisky

She
of gigantic hips and small breasts
clutching a book that smells of
armpits and forgotten roses

He
who speaks in seven languages
and dreams of distant places
and petite women

make love under the evening sun
on a boat swaying on still waters.

*

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After completing MBA from Bangalore University, Sowmya Aaryan Menon started working as a copyeditor for International magazines and newspapers and in publishing companies, editing fiction and non-fiction. She is also a trained copywriter and has freelanced for the creative department in Scion Advertising agency and JWT Bangalore. She is currently pursuing MA in English Literature from Annamalai University. The three poems in the current issue are her first publication.